Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (13.5-Inch) Review

The Surface Laptop 3's touch screen is Microsoft's unique PixelSense display, which has a resolution of 2,256 by 1,504 pixels. That results in a rather unusual 3:2 aspect ratio. (Most laptops have wider screen ratios of 16:9.)

4.0

Excellent

The Bottom Line

With a snappy, satisfying keyboard and solid battery life, Microsoft's 13.5-inch Surface Laptop 3 is an excellent ultraportable that gets the basics right.

Pros

Comfortable keyboard and touchpad.

Excellent display quality.

Long battery life.

Multiple color and chassis-material options.

Cons

No fingerprint reader.

Could use a few more ports.

Microsoft's answer to the Apple MacBook is the Surface Laptop, an ultraportable laptop that focuses on comfort and portability but skips most of the tricked-out features found on some high-end Windows notebooks, such as webcam privacy shutters and watchband-style 360-degree hinges. Now in its third generation, the 13.5-inch Surface Laptop 3 (starts at $999; $1,599 as tested) is an excellent option for people who seek the Windows mobile experience as Microsoft intends it.

The Growing Surface Family

The Surface Laptop family is expanding. Originally comprising a lone 13.5-inch model with a unique soft gray "Alcantara fabric" covering its palm rest, the line now includes multiple sizes, color options, configurations, and material choices. The model I'm reviewing here is the Sandstone metal version with a 13.5-inch touch screen and an Intel Core i7 processor. Other chassis-color options at this screen size include Black, Platinum, and Cobalt Blue. The laptop is also available in a larger 15-inch version, which only comes in the first two color options.

The Sandstone finish looks handsome and understated. It takes on a slightly pinkish hue under bright light, but it's not nearly as flashy as the Rose Gold color option available on the Apple MacBook Air. Other than the new color options (some of which lack Alcantara fabric, only available on the Platinum and Cobalt Blue versions), the Surface Laptop 3's physical design remains nearly identical to that of the first and second generations. It's a traditional clamshell form factor. You won't find a detachable keyboard or a 360-degree hinge here, designs Microsoft has championed in partnerships with other manufacturers and used in its own Surface Pro line to present Windows as a viable tablet operating system.

Acer Swift 5 (14-Inch)

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (15-Inch)

If all you need is a laptop, though, the Surface Laptop 3 is an excellent one. The supremely sturdy unibody construction inspires confidence, giving up a bit of weight and size savings in the name of reassuring build quality. There are lighter and smaller laptops with 13- and 14-inch screens, such as the Acer Swift 7, but they often sacrifice build quality, typing comfort, audio quality, or sometimes all three to achieve their sleekness. The Asus ZenBook 13, whose vanishingly thin screen borders make it a member of the ultraportable laptop vanguard, measures 0.7 by 11.9 by 7.5 inches and weighs 2.83 pounds. But even with thicker bezels and some extra screen real estate, the Surface Laptop 3 comes in not far above those measurements, at 0.57 by 12.1 by 8.8 inches. It also weighs the same.

Typing and Tapping With Ease

Many people who once dashed off emails at their office desktop PC now do so from the corner coffee shop or an airplane tray table, which is why laptop keyboard quality is so important. The Surface Laptop 3 does not disappoint typists, with its sturdy, well-spaced keys that travel a generous 1.3mm before fully depressing with a rich, satisfying thud. It's at least as good as Lenovo's legendary ThinkPad keyboards, and I also find it more comfortable than the extraordinarily shallow keyboard on the MacBook Air.

Even though the Surface Laptop 3 has a touch-enabled display, and interacting with Windows via touch is a viable means of using your PC, there's no substitute for moving a cursor to perform some tasks, such as selecting text. Fortunately, the touchpad is as excellent as the keyboard, with an equally satisfying thud when you click it. I still prefer the haptic feedback and larger size of Apple's trackpads, but the Surface Laptop 3 touchpad is as good as any Windows pad I've used.

A Unique Ratio

The touch screen itself is one of Microsoft's PixelSense displays, with a resolution of 2,256 by 1,504 pixels that results in a rather unusual 3:2 aspect ratio. Most laptops have wider 16:9 screen ratios, which makes them excellent movie-watching platforms but decreases the amount of vertical space available to scroll through a web page, spreadsheet, or text document. If you plan to use your Surface Laptop 3 primarily for web surfing or word processing, know that it's well suited to these tasks.

In addition to tapping with your fingers, you can use Microsoft's Surface Pen to write or draw on the screen. If you plan to spend a significant amount of time doing so, however, you may want to check out the Surface Pro 7 or Surface Go instead. They're tablets, not laptops, which makes them more conducive to pen input since you can hold them to avoid the annoying bouncing screen that makes writing on a laptop more difficult.

Above the display, there's a webcam with an IR sensor to let you log in to your Windows 10 account using facial recognition. It's the only way you can log in without typing a PIN or password, since the Surface Laptop 3 lacks a fingerprint reader.

Now Arriving: USB Type-C

The input/output port selection has always been one of the Surface Laptop's key weaknesses, and while the situation has slightly improved with the third generation, it's still far from ideal.

The Surface Laptop 3 has a USB Type-C port, unlike its predecessors, which makes connecting to the latest external drives and phone charging cables more convenient. Besides this port, you get a USB Type-A port, a headphone jack, and a Surface Connect port. The last is for connecting to an optional $200 Surface Dock. That peripheral adds a gigabit Ethernet port, four USB 3.0 ports, and an audio output to the mix. The dock's video output is in the form of two mini DisplayPort connectors, which means you will still need an adapter or special cable to connect to most external monitors.

A Thunderbolt 3 port is conspicuously absent from both the laptop and the optional dock. As a minor consolation prize, you do get a single additional USB port built into the AC adapter. That USB port works only for charging USB devices, however, not for data transfer. The Surface Laptop 3 supports Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.0 for wireless connections.

Audio quality remains essentially unchanged from the Surface Laptop 2, as Microsoft isn't touting any improved speakers or sound processing. Still, the speakers deliver reasonable quality and surprisingly loud sound, even below maximum volume. You'll probably want to keep the volume dialed down a little from 100 percent, as higher pitches become tinny at that level, and it's plenty loud at 80 or even 60 percent.

Configuration Options

The Surface Laptop 3 configuration reviewed here comes with 16GB of memory and a 256GB solid-state drive, in addition to the 10th Generation "Ice Lake" Intel Core i7-1065G7 processor with four cores and Hyper-Threading support. The base model comes with a Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and the same SSD storage capacity. All configurations offer Intel Iris Plus integrated graphics.

In a departure from the sealed-shut chassis of most other ultraportables, the Surface Laptop 3's SSD is designed to be removed and replaced, albeit only by authorized service technicians. You need a special tool and heavy-duty suction cups, putting the operation out of the grasp of all but the most committed DIY-ers. It's best to upgrade the SSD at the time of purchase if you need more space; Microsoft offers 512GB and 1TB options.

AMD Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs, which come standard on the 15-inch version of the Surface Laptop 3, are not offered on the 13.5-inch model.

Performance Testing

I benchmarked this version of the Surface Laptop 3 against a few competing ultraportable laptops, whose basic specs appear in the chart below.

The Surface Laptop 3 performed slightly worse on most tasks than a similarly configured 15-inch model, which is to be expected since the larger laptop has more room for heat to dissipate and can therefore operate at maximum performance for longer periods. Multimedia performance varied significantly, with the Surface Laptop 3 outperforming the Core i5-equipped Apple MacBook Pro 13 on some tasks but not others. Graphics performance was impressive, though not quite up to the level of the Asus ZenBook 13's discrete GPU.

Productivity and Media Tests

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.

PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system's boot drive. This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better. Most modern laptops with SSDs perform roughly equally on PCMark 8, while any PCMark 10 result above 4,000 or 4,500 represents excellent performance. In anecdotal testing over the course of a few days, I experienced no sluggishness with the Surface Laptop 3 when opening or closing apps and browsing resource-intensive websites.

Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Here, the Surface Laptop 3 performed slightly (but not meaningfully) better than both the ZenBook 13 and Apple MacBook Pro.

Related

Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that's highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It's a timed test, and lower results are better. The Surface Laptop 3 trailed its competitors here.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total; as with Handbrake, lower times are better. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.

The Photoshop test results were more closely clustered than they were in the Cinebench and Handbrake tests, though the Surface Laptop 3 outperformed the MacBook Pro by a meaningful margin.

Graphics Tests

The Surface Laptop 3's Iris Plus integrated graphics are quicker than the Intel UHD Graphics of its predecessor, but still fall behind an entry-level discrete GPU like the Nvidia GeForce MX250 in the Asus and Dell. Our 3DMark and Superposition results reflect this.

3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.

Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.

Battery Life Testing

Finally, after fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a 720p video with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.

Nearly 15 hours is an excellent result, but it's not quite as good as the Apple MacBook Pro's 18 and a half hours.

On the Surface, an Iterative Improvement

The 13.5-inch Surface Laptop 3 is a modest improvement on a well-designed ultraportable that gets the basics right. People who need to type all day will appreciate the comfortable keyboard and touchpad, and the expanded range of color and material options will help pretty much everyone find a match. The laptop offers decent computing performance and a battery that should last all day away from a power outlet. Its display quality is excellent, and its anemic port selection can be overlooked if you're willing to buy a USB hub or invest in the Surface Dock.

If you want cutting-edge features like Touch Bars, powerful GPUs, or extra-thin screen bezels, however, you'll want to look elsewhere, either to Microsoft's excellent Surface Pro 7 or the legions of futuristic ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Pro, Razer Blade Stealth, and Asus ZenBook 13.

About Tom Brant

As a hardware analyst, Tom tests and reviews laptops, peripherals, and much more at PC Labs in New York City. He previously covered the consumer tech beat as a news reporter for PCMag in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where he rode in several self-driving cars and witnessed the rise and fall of many startups. Before that, he worked for PCMag's sister site, Computer Shopper, where he occasionally dunked waterproof hard drives in glasses of water. In his spare time, he's written on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and big data's role in presidential elections. A graduate of Middlebury College, Tom also has a master's degree in journalism and French Studies from New York University. Follow him on Twitter @branttom.

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